History Quotes

Ideas shape the course of history.

John Maynard Keynes

History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

Ambrose Gwinett Bierce

Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.

Stephen Jay Gould

History is a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.

Edmund Burke

Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy.

Margaret Thatche

A page of history is worth a pound of logic.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

Dwight D Eisenhowe

Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.

Nadia Boulange

Those who don? t build must burn. It? s as old as history and juvenile delinquence.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Hermann Hesse

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

Will Durant

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Gustave Flaubert

There was never in the history of the world a great politician who was not hated by large numbers of inferior men.

Unknown

I believe that individuals can make a difference in society. Since periods of change such as the present one come so rarely in human history, it is up to each of us to make the best use of our time to help create a happier world.

The Dalai Lama, 1992 Speech

Well - Behaved women rarely make history.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishfull thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers chapter 4

It is not observed in history that families improve with time.

George William Curtis

History is a vision of God? s creation on the move.

Arnold Toynbee

In history as in life it is success that counts. Start a political upheaval and let yourself be caught, and you will hang as a traitor. But place yourself at the head of a rebellion and gain your point, and all future generations will worship you as the Father of their Country.

Hendrik W. Van Loon

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

Barbara Ehrenreich

I cannot join the space program and restart my life as an astronaut, but this opportunity to connect my abilities as an educator with my interests in history and space is a unique opportunity to fulfill my early fantasies.

Christa McAuliffe

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.

Mitch Ratliffe

The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.

Carl Rowen

The history of human opinion is scarcely anything more than the history of human errors.

Voltaire

History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.

Theodore Harold White

History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.

James A. Forude

The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

George Frost Kennan

Men make history, and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.

Harry S Truman

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

Georges Clemenceau

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

Napoleon Bonaparte

History knows no resting places and no plateaus.

Henry Kissinge

Inflation is bringing us true democracy. For the first time in history, luxuries and necessities are selling at the same price.

Robert Orben

When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.

C. P. Snow

More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to utter hopelessness and despair, the other to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Woody Allen

The history of the human race, viewed as a whole may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally, and for this purpose, also externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed.

Immanuel Kant

Never in the history of mankind have so many owed so much to so few.

Sir Winston Churchill, Reffering to the RAF

Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books - But it is terrible when one has to live it.

Jean Anouilh